“We overpunish and overcriminalize,” Douglas Husak insists in his latest book-length tour de force entitled Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law.1 In what ways and by what mea...

Criminal provisions governing the treatment of animals collectively embody inconsistencies that reflect deep-seated ambivalence about who counts as the victim of animal cruelty, what constitutes the wrong of such cruelty, and what role punishment ought to play in response to it. In the first part, I shall sketch how animal cruelty laws embody tensions and contradictions that make manifest the criminal law’s need for philosophical clarity. In the second part, I shall argue that one way to bring a modicum of (...) order to animal cruelty provisions is to recognize that their cross-cutting prohibitions and permissions respond to, and perhaps exploit, competing understandings of whether one, some, or all of the five principles of legislation appropriately inform the reach of the criminal law. I shall, accordingly, unpack the significant doctrinal disagreements about when and why we should punish animal abusers by working through the ways in which animal cruelty provisions appear to be responsive to inconsistent views about the very point of the criminal law. (shrink)

This chapter synthesizes Michael Moore’s scholarly opus, organizing the breathtaking array of topics that he has tackled, restating the field-changing theses that he has defended, and extracting a set of common themes that define the essential components of his intellectual legacy. Along the way, it draws upon personal experiences in Michael’s life that may have influenced his scholarly choices. On pain of committing the genetic fallacy, the piece does not purport either to bolster or to debunk any of his claims (...) simply by explaining them in terms of their causal antecedents. Still, the causal antecedents of beliefs can be interesting for their own sake. So the project is to provide a systematic and comprehensive taxonomy of Michael’s work and to salt it with biographical events, relationships, triumphs, and traumas that illuminate how personal the ideas that have defined his prolific academic career to date have been. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from the profoundly influential work of legal theorist Larry Alexander, this volume tackles central questions in criminal law, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy. What are the legitimate conditions of blame and punishment? What values are at the heart of constitutional protections against discrimination or infringements of free speech? Must judges interpret statutes and constitutional provisions in ways that comport with the intentions of those who wrote them? Can the law obligate us to violate the demands of morality, (...) and when can the law allow the rights of the few to be violated for the good of the many? This collection of essays by world-renowned legal theorists is for anyone interested in foundational questions about the law's authority, the conditions of its fair application to citizens, and the moral justifications of the rights, duties, and permissions that it protects. (shrink)

:This essay undertakes two tasks: first, to describe the differing mens rea requirements for accomplice liability of both Anglo-American common law and the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code; and second, to recommend how the mens rea requirements of both of these two sources of criminal law in America should be amended so as to satisfy the goals of clarity and consistency and so as to more closely conform the criminal law to the requirements of moral blameworthiness. Three "pure models" (...) of the mens rea requirements for complicity are distinguished, based on the three theories of liability conventionally distinguished in the general part of Anglo-American criminal law. One of these, the vicarious responsibility model, is put aside initially because of both its descriptive inaccuracy and its normative undesirability. The analysis proceeds using the other two models: that of the mens rea requirements for principal liability for completed crimes, and that of the mens rea requirements for attempt liability. Both the common law and the Model Penal Code are seen as complicated admixtures of these two models, the common law being too narrow in the scope of its threatened liability and the Model Penal Code being both too broad and too opaque in its demands for accomplice liability. The normative recommendation of the paper is to adopt the model for the mens rea of complicity that treats it as a form of principal liability, recognizing that the overbreadth of liability resulting from adoption of that model would have to be redressed by adopting a "shopkeeper's privilege" as an affirmative defense separate from any mens rea requirement. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.UNTYING THE GORDIAN KNOT OF MENS REA REQUIREMENTS FOR ACCOMPLICESVolume 32, Issue 2Heidi M. Hurd and Michael S. Moore DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000157Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. UNTYING THE GORDIAN KNOT OF MENS REA REQUIREMENTS FOR ACCOMPLICESVolume 32, Issue 2Heidi M. Hurd and Michael S. Moore DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000157Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. UNTYING THE GORDIAN KNOT OF MENS REA REQUIREMENTS FOR ACCOMPLICESVolume 32, Issue 2Heidi M. Hurd and Michael S. Moore DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052516000157Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

The article examines what has come to be known as "the risk analysis" in Anglo-American tort law and contract law. The risk analysis essentially consists of: viewing negligence as a relational concept, so that a defendant is never simply negligent tout cour, but is negligent only with respect to certain persons and certain harms — other harms suffered by other persons are said not to be "within the risk" that makes the defendant negligent; and the supplanting of proximate cause doctrine (...) with doctrines of duty, the duty question being determined by the question of whether a certain person and a certain harm are within the risk that makes a defendant negligent. The article aims to explode entirely the risk analysis. After beginning with an examination of the historical roots of the risk analysis, we then seek to show that the risk analysis is: conceptually incoherent because it seeks to isolate a risk that makes someone negligent; normatively undesirable because it allows quite blameworthy actors not to pay for the harms they culpably cause; and descriptively inaccurate of the cases decided on the more traditional, proximate cause bases. (shrink)

This chapter explores reasons to doubt the defensibility of the “weak theory of sustainability” that informs and justifies the use of cost-benefit analysis by environmental regulators. As the argument reveals, inasmuch as the weak theory equates what is sustainable with what sustains the satisfaction of human preferences, it has the surprising philosophical wherewithal to make climate-changing activities sustainable, at least in principle. This would be so if human ingenuity made possible the replacement of ecosystem services with technological alternatives. And it (...) would be particularly so if the aesthetic goods that derive from nature – goods which are resistant to quantification – are excluded from environmental cost-benefit analyses. But it is also true if those aesthetic goods are reduced to mere human preferences that can be measured through indirect market-based means, for aesthetic preferences are remarkably adaptive.Inasmuch as people can be expected to come to appreciate landscapes degraded by climate change, those who defend a weak theory of sustainability can expect that climate change will not long be at odds with what people find aesthetically pleasing. However, as the growing literature on “nature-deficit disorder” suggests, while aesthetic preferences may be elastic, aesthetic needs are not. As climate change progressively strips us of nature’s goods, we will lose the ability to meet crucial aesthetic needs. The irony is clear: As our aesthetic preferences bend towards the acceptance of ecological loss, we will predictably lose our preferences for meeting our own enduring aesthetic needs. We can thus expect climate change to cause us to prefer what we do not need and to need what we do not prefer. And this implies that climate change is the reductio ad absurdum of the weak theory of sustainability that dominates contemporary environmental regulation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Judaism and EnlightenmentHeidi Morrison RavvenAdam Sutcliffe. Judaism and Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 314. Cloth, $60.00.Adam Sutcliffe's detailed and wide-ranging historical study of the image of the Jews and of Judaism in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers very broadly conceived might better be [End Page 343] titled Enlightenment Myths of Jews and Judaism. Sutcliffe admirably captures the consistently mythic portrayal of Jews (...) and Judaism mostly offered as interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) rather than with reference to actual living or historical Jews. Although not explicitly acknowledged, what Sutcliffe offers the reader is a comprehensive catalogue of Enlightenment ideology or, better, theologizing about Judaism and the Jews. I say theologizing because the ubiquitous stark ambivalence toward the Jews that Sutcliffe argues Enlightenment thinkers to a person harbored, from the early Christian Hebraists and Kabbalists to the deists, to Voltaire and beyond the Enlightenment proper even to Freud (whom Sutcliffe not completely in jest regards as the last philosophe) echoes and reconfigures the quintessential Christian ambivalence toward Jews as both God's chosen and God's rejected. Christianity's need to legitimate the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament stands in perpetual conflict with its need to de-legitimate the Jews as its rightful owners and heirs. Sutcliffe is utterly convincing that the Enlightenment conception of the Jews has irreducible mythic and conflictual aspects.The author's intended purpose, however, which is to convince the reader that Judaism and the Jews are the paradigmatic crux of the unassimilability of the mythic and particular by Enlightenment reason and hence to bring into question Enlightenment ideals themselves, is less convincing. Instead the data Sutcliffe amasses seem to point to the conclusion that Enlightenment thinkers were deeply imbued with mythic categories and ancient prejudices not easily sloughed off by mere protestations of rational autonomy and commitment to universal ideals.Sutcliffe's mistake is to grant to the Enlightenment thinkers their ground on both their self-valuation as exemplars of the deployment of universal reason or rational universalism and also their classification of Judaism as particularist mythos in opposition to just such reason. What Sutcliffe's carefully collected and exhaustively presented data suggest, instead, is that when it came to Judaism, the Enlightenment thinkers were neither rational nor universalist but instead culture bound and impassioned. The book's great strength is its admirable and exhaustive scholarly grasp of European Enlightenment works and its systematic presentation of the Jews in the imagination of these Enlighteners. Nevertheless, missing from this book is a scholarly understanding of Jewish sources both biblical and post-biblical and especially of Jewish philosophy. As a result, Judaism (and even the Hebrew Bible) signify to the author what Enlighteners mistakenly and prejudicially cast it as, namely, Europe's quintessential mythic particularism. But this caricature ignores the reality of rabbinic Judaism's profoundly rationalist tendencies and also the universalist aspirations and claims of the Jewish philosophic tradition whose deep roots go back to the Hellenistic era, let alone the universality of the Bible which is hardly less than that of Shakespeare. Hence Sutcliffe perpetuates a negative (and false) stereotype in the name of valorizing it. In this he is persuaded by a post-modernist agenda suggested, but not generally intrusive, throughout the book and made explicit at the end.Particularly jarring is Sutcliffe's inclusion of Spinoza in his catalogue of Enlightenment villifiers of Judaism as a form of unassimilable particularism and mythic primitivism. Spinoza instead clearly and repeatedly argues in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that biblical Judaism is exemplified par excellence by its universalist ethics and hence it is the Ancient Jewish Commonwealth that ought to serve as an exemplar for the Dutch republic and all modern polities, as Michael Rosenthal has admirably shown in several essays. Spinoza draws this conclusion from the deployment of what he explicitly develops as his scientific method of reading texts, a method he argues is the same as the scientific method of amassing the data of nature and systematizing it in order to let its explanatory categories emerge therefrom (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, vii). The central result of using the scientific method on the Bible... (shrink)

We regularly wield powers that, upon close scrutiny, appear remarkably magical. By sheer exercise of will, we bring into existence things that have never existed before. With but a nod, we effect the disappearance of things that have long served as barriers to the actions of others. And, by mere resolve, we generate things that pose significant obstacles to others' exercise of liberty. What is the nature of these things that we create and destroy by our mere decision to do (...) so? The answer: the rights and obligations of others. And by what seemingly magical means do we alter these rights and obligations? By making promises and issuing or revoking consent When we make promises, we generate obligations for ourselves, and when we give consent, we create rights for others. Since the rights and obligations that are affected by means of promising and consenting largely define the boundaries of permissible action, our exercise of these seemingly magical powers can significantly affect the lives and liberties of others. (shrink)

As endosymbionts, the mitochondria are unique among organelles. This review provides insights into mitochondrial behavior and introduces the idea of a unified collective, an interconnected reticulum reminiscent of the Borg, a fictional humanoid species from the Star Trek television series whereby decisions are made within their network (or “hive”), linked to signaling cascades that coordinate the cross‐talk between mitochondrial and cellular processes (“subspace domain”). Similarly, mitochondrial dynamics are determined by two distinct processes, namely the local regulation of fission/fusion and the (...) global control of their behavior through cellular signaling pathways. Indeed, decisions within the hive provide each mitochondrial unit with autonomous control of their own degradation, whereby mitochondrial fusion is inactivated and they become substrates for autophagy. Decisions within the subspace domain couple signaling pathways involved in the functional integration of mitochondria with complex cellular transitions, including developmental cues, mitosis, and apoptosis. (shrink)

Offered here is a review of Gregg D. Caruso’s edited volume, Exploring the Illusion of Free will and Moral Responsibility [1]. Assembled here are essays by nearly all the major contributors to the philosophical free will debate on the denial and skeptical side. The volume tells us where the field currently is and also gives us a sense of how the free will debate is actually advancing toward greater understanding. Perhaps we can even discern some glimmer of hope for a (...) resolution or a degree of consensus that could, in the near future, underlie or give rise to practical engagements to bring about significant social transformations and innovations toward a more humane society. (shrink)

Serious ethical violations in medicine, such as sexual abuse, criminal prescribing of opioids, and unnecessary surgeries, directly harm patients and undermine trust in the profession of medicine. We review the literature on violations in medicine and present an analysis of 280 cases. Nearly all cases involved repeated instances of intentional wrongdoing, by males in nonacademic medical settings, with oversight problems and a selfish motive such as financial gain or sex. More than half of cases involved a wrongdoer with a suspected (...) personality disorder or substance use disorder. Despite clear patterns, no factors provide readily observable red flags, making prevention difficult. Early identification and intervention in cases requires significant policy shifts that prioritize the safety of patients over physician interests in privacy, fair processes, and proportionate disciplinary actions. We explore a series of 10 questions regarding policy, oversight, discipline, and education options. Satisfactory answers to these questions will require input from diverse stakeholders to help society negotiate effective and ethically balanced solutions. (shrink)

In this piece, I argue that promises need not be kept just because they were made. This is not to say, however, that unwise, unhappy, and unfortunate promises do not generate obligations. When broken promises will result either in wrongful gains to promisors or wrongful losses to promisees, obligations of corrective justice will demand that such promises be kept if their breach cannot be fully repaired. Thus, when a broken promise will constitute a deliberate loss transfer for personal gain, the (...) duty not to exact unjust enrichment will require a promisor either to honor her promise or craft a means of ensuring that the promisee’s impoverishment is not traded for her enrichment. And when a broken promise will constitute the culpable imposition of a reliance-based injury on a nonculpable promisee, the duty to make others whole when one has purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly injured them will require one either to keep one’s promise or to fashion a remedy for its breach that ensures that the promisee is left no worse off than he would be had the promise not been made. This account explicitly parts ways with normative powers theories of promising. It places no weight at all on the raw fact that a promise has been made. Instead, it locates the gravamen of a promissory violation in the harm that is caused to a promisee who nonculpably relies upon and changes her position in anticipation of the prediction about the promisor’s future conduct that is embedded in his promise. Absent any adverse reliance on the part of a promisee, there is nothing that gives rise to an obligation of performance or repair on the part of the promisor. But this account is also to be distinguished from utilitarian theories that take promises to be instruments of wealth maximization that properly give way whenever the reason for honoring them speaks in favor of violating them. On my account, the balance of reasons for action that determines the morality of performance includes deontological rights and duties, agent-relative permissions, and Hohfeldian liberties. As I shall argue, even if one rightly concludes that one has no duty either to keep a promise or to craft a remedy for its breach, one must nevertheless remember that virtue requires one to be or become the kind of person who often goes beyond the call of duty. But the fact that virtue often requires us to do what we have no duty to do should not cause us to confuse its conditions with the conditions of right and wrong action. We have a duty to keep promises or to otherwise protect the reliance interests that they generate only when failing to do so will lead either to our own unjust enrichment or to others’ unjust injury. And this means that we have a duty to keep promises in far fewer circumstances than is commonly believed. (shrink)

Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow—or risk causing or allowing—such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did (...) not advert to the risk; (3) culpably acquiring or failing to rid oneself of these defects of character at some earlier time; (4) flawed use of those practical reasoning capacities that make one the person one is; or (5) chosen violation of per se rules about known precautions. Although each of these five theories can justify blame in some cases of negligence, none can justify blame in all cases intuitively thought to be cases of negligence, nor can any of these five theories show why inadvertent creation of an unreasonable risk, pure and simple, can be blameworthy. (shrink)

Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow—or risk causing or allowing—such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did (...) not advert to the risk; (3) culpably acquiring or failing to rid oneself of these defects of character at some earlier time; (4) flawed use of those practical reasoning capacities that make one the person one is; or (5) chosen violation of per se rules about known precautions. Although each of these five theories can justify blame in some cases of negligence, none can justify blame in all cases intuitively thought to be cases of negligence, nor can any of these five theories show why inadvertent creation of an unreasonable risk, pure and simple, can be blameworthy. (shrink)

This article details the degree to which the ideal of punishment proportional to desert forces changes in how we think of deontological morality. More specifically, the proportionality ideal forces us to abandon the simple, text-like view of deontological moral norms, and it forces us to acknowledge that those norms are not uniformly categorical in their force.

Although rituals are considered central to human life, scholarship on rituals in music education is sparse. This may be due to a more general emphasis on the individual and private at the expense of the social and public aspects of music in education. This article highlights the educational value of school rituals in festivities and celebrations, arguing that there is a need to revisit the idea of musical performance as ritual from an educational perspective. By leaning on anthropological viewpoints, musical (...) performances in school rituals are seen as having a central place in youth life and as revealing a school's core values: rituals are considered as social arenas where students can enact who they are and gain implicit knowledge that guides them on an embodied way. They also aid students to explore, affirm, and celebrate their important life relationships. School rituals, however, involve a pedagogical paradox: they not only manifest traditional values and the prevailing order, but may also reflect and actively promote desired changes. Therefore, school rituals and musical performances in rituals should be constantly re-evaluated from an educational perspective so that they can function as critical educational-culture machineries for conscious change. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 9, September 2019, Page W1-W2.

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

In a recent IPQ article, Christopher Kaczor gave a promising argument in which he strove to reconcile the common belief that obstetric craniotomy is immoral with his clear and intuitively attractive account of intention. One of Kaczor’s crucial assumptions is that intentional mutilation is morally impermissible. In this article I argue that Kaczor’s analysis has three potential problems: the mutilating features of craniotomy do not appear to meet Kaczor’s criteria for being intended, so his account doesn’t show craniotomy to be (...) impermissible; some commonly-accepted acts, including voluntary sterilization, are acts of intentional mutilation according to Kaczor’s definition and are thus forbidden on his account; and some acts that intuitively seem to constitute intentional mutilation do not meet Kaczor’s definition of “mutilation” and are not ruled out by his account. I suggest slight modifications to Kaczor’s account that might address these difficulties. (shrink)

Both Immanuel Kant and Moses Maimonides wrote lengthy treatments of the biblical garden of Eden. For both philosophers the biblical story served as an opportunity to address the genealogy of morals. I argue here that the two treatments offer deep insights into their respective philosophical anthropologies, that is to say, into their assessments of the human person and of moral psychology. Contrary to much that has been written about Maimonides as a proto-Kantian, I expose the profoundly different and even opposed (...) conceptions of human nature and of reason at the heart of the respective philosophies. For Kant, the first exercise of reason in the garden is an act of rebellion that jettisons the human person from the womb of nature into a post-natural freedom. The repudiation of the natural is the beginning of an ethical life, according to Kant—a life to be dominated by respect for a human dignity beyond the natural. For Maimonides, in contrast, reason is a philosophical torah li-shma . Rational understanding is an understanding of the laws of a nature fecund with the presence of the divine. Exposing the reason inherent in nature is the only path to knowledge of God and whatever communion with the divine is available to human beings. Such knowledge transforms the heart as well as fills the mind, embedding the human person as moral actor in a God-filled universe. (shrink)

In a recent IPQ article, Christopher Kaczor gave a promising argument in which he strove to reconcile the common belief that obstetric craniotomy (the crushing of nearlyborn fetuses’ heads) is immoral with his clear and intuitively attractive account of intention. One of Kaczor’s crucial assumptions is that intentional mutilation is morally impermissible. In this article I argue that Kaczor’s analysis has three potential problems: (1) the mutilating features of craniotomy do not appear to meet Kaczor’s criteria for being intended, so (...) his account doesn’t show craniotomy to be impermissible; (2) some commonly-accepted acts, including voluntary sterilization, are acts of intentional mutilation according to Kaczor’s definition and are thus forbidden on his account; and (3) some acts that intuitively seem to constitute intentional mutilation do not meet Kaczor’s definition of “mutilation” and are not ruled out by his account. I suggest slight modifications to Kaczor’s account that might address these difficulties. (shrink)

Can art encourage social progress without invoking empathy? Bertolt Brecht thought so. He built convention violations into his plays in order to alienate audiences from their empathetic responses. He did this in order to encourage reasoned responses among his audience members. In so doing, Brecht ran the risk that spectators would imaginatively resist the play and focus exclusively on the convention violations. This kind of imaginative resistance does in fact undermine Brecht's purpose of achieving social progress. Contrary to Brecht's assessment, (...) empathy is cognitive in nature and is a vehicle by which Brecht could have effectively realized his goal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 385-406 [Access article in PDF] Some Thoughts on What Spinoza Learned from Maimonides on the Prophetic Imagination Part Two:Spinoza's Maimonideanism Heidi M. Ravven 1. Spinoza's Maimonideanism Now it is precisely with the belief that the prophets were philosophers and the Bible offers veiled insights into the central doctrines of philosophy, so powerfully argued and deeply held by Maimonides that he (...) included it as one of his Thirteen Principles of Jewish Faith the acceptance of which is a necessary condition of a share in the World to Come, 1 that Spinoza took strong issue. 2 At the same time, however, Spinoza agreed with Maimonides' doctrine [End Page 385] of the a. imaginative (literary) character 3 and b. the political function 4 of the Bible and of its authors and of the major prophetic figures. The quite obvious influence of Maimonides' account of prophecy upon Spinoza's account in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) has been widely recognized and commented upon. That is to say (although no commentator up till now, as far as I know, has made this point explicit), Spinoza adopted Maimonides' conception of prophecy as mimetic or productive and not only—or chiefly—as receptive. 5 The Maimonidean account of the (prophetic) imagination clarifies why the atomic fact model of the receptive function of the imagination is inapplicable to the TTP. The imaginative character of prophecy is not about picking up information (in a dream or otherwise) delivered from God; rather, it concerns how one understands (and presents) certain truths (in the case of Spinoza's notion of prophecy, namely, those of ethics and in Maimonides' those of science as well as of ethics) imaginatively rather than rationally, i.e., within a web of (narrative and symbolic) associations instead of within the deductive order of rational causal explanation. "Now we see," Spinoza, in the first chapter [End Page 386] of the Tractatus, 6 writes, echoing Maimonides (esp. Guide II, 47), "why the teachings of the prophets were nearly all in the form of parables and allegories, and why all spiritual matters were expressed in corporeal form, for this is more appropriate to the imaginative faculty." Prophecy does not consist in the simple reception of pieces of information transmitted directly from God. This is not what it is for Maimonides nor for Spinoza.Thus we find that Spinoza formally defines the prophet in the beginning of TTP, chapter i, as "one who interprets (interpretatur) God's revelations to those who cannot attain to certain knowledge of the matters revealed... For the Hebrew word for prophet is nabi, that is, speaker and interpreter (orator et interpres)." 7 The prophet is interpreter in imaginative terms, whether he reformulates belief imaginatively or instead merely understands it in that way himself to begin with. Prophecy is an imaginative (narrative, symbolic) rather than a philosophical (logical and demonstrable) type of understanding and presentation. If one looks at Spinoza's account of prophecy in TTP i, one finds that immediately after Spinoza defines prophecy, he then goes on to tell us what revelation is scientifically: "the nature of [the human] mind... is the primary cause of divine revelation." That is to say, the mind itself, whether rationally in intellectual thought or in its imaginative capacity and in both cases as itself a product of divine (i.e., natural) causes, supplies the content of revelation. 8 Spinoza then goes on to say that now that we have understood the true explanation of prophecy, we must return from this scientific understanding to the biblical account of prophecy. At that point he tells us that "the Jews never make mention of intermediate or particular causes nor pay any heed to them, but to serve religion and piety... they refer everything to God." Now this is a crucial passage and must be used as an interpretive principle for all that follows. (Spinoza illustrates the point in some detail at the end of the chapter where he lists the various... (shrink)

Domestic violence is an important social problem that strongly impacts the healthcare system. It is estimated that two to four million women are physically abused each year by their husbands, ex-husbands, or boyfriends. Many of these abused women enter the medical system as patients with physical injuries, somatic symptoms, or psychiatric problems. These patients represent a large proportion of women patients in a variety of clinical settings: 22–35% of women presenting to emergency departments, up to 37% of obstetric patients, and (...) over 25% of women seeking primary care. Despite the significant health implications of marital abuse, healthcare providers often fail to identify and treat this problem when signs are present. (shrink)

In his comments on the film version of Schindler’s List, James B. Pinkerton, writing in New York Newsday, blames Hegel - and Hegel above all others - for Nazism. He charges Hegel with undermining “the last bulwark of liberty and safety we have in a world populated by the imperfect: the rule of law.” Pinkerton further suggests, “One can perhaps build a respectable ideology out of a Hegelianism … but it’s much easier to just write ‘totalitarianism’ on such a political (...) blank check.”. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss ethical lessons we can learn from the stories and beliefs of moral exemplars—and how these insights can complement and extend the knowledge we gain through theoretical study. First, exemplars teach us psychological lessons about the way in which virtue is developed and expressed: e.g., about role modeling and post-traumatic growth. Second, they teach us philosophical lessons about the nature of virtue itself and of particular ethical virtues: e.g., about how virtuous people deliberate and how they (...) perceive the mean of virtue. Third, exemplars’ stories teach us personal lessons about our own lives and character: e.g., about how far we are from acting or even thinking like virtuous people—and how much better our lives would be if we were genuinely virtuous. I conclude by discussing an ethical puzzle moral exemplars have not helped me solve: apparent disunity of the virtues. (shrink)

Rationale: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the hippocampus is proposed for enhancement of memory impaired by injury or disease. Many pre-clinical DBS paradigms can be addressed in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for seizure localization, since they already have electrodes implanted in brain areas of interest. Even though epilepsy is usually not a memory disorder targeted by DBS, the studies can nevertheless model other memory-impacting disorders, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Methods: Human patients undergoing Phase II invasive monitoring for (...) intractable epilepsy were implanted with depth electrodes capable of recording neurophysiological signals. Subjects performed a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) memory task while hippocampal ensembles from CA1 and CA3 cell layers were recorded to estimate a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of CA3-to-CA1 neural encoding and a memory decoding model (MDM) to decode memory information from CA3 and CA1 neuronal signals. After model estimation, subjects again performed the DMS task while either MIMO-based or MDM-based patterned stimulation was delivered to CA1 electrode sites during the encoding phase of the DMS trials. Each subject was sorted (post hoc) by prior experience of repeated and/or mild-to-moderate brain injury (RMBI), TBI, or no history (control) and scored for percentage successful delayed recognition (DR) recall on stimulated vs. non-stimulated DMS trials. The subject’s medical history was unknown to the experimenters until after individual subject memory retention results were scored. Results: When examined compared to control subjects, both TBI and RMBI subjects showed increased memory retention in response to both MIMO and MDM-based hippocampal stimulation. Furthermore, effects of stimulation were also greater in subjects who were evaluated as having pre-existing mild-to-moderate memory impairment. Conclusion: These results show that hippocampal stimulation for memory facilitation was more beneficial for subjects who had previously suffered a brain injury (other than epilepsy), compared to control (epilepsy) subjects who had not suffered a brain injury. This study demonstrates that the epilepsy/intracranial recording model can be extended to test the ability of DBS to restore memory function in subjects who previously suffered a brain injury other than epilepsy, and support further investigation into the beneficial effect of DBS in TBI patients. (shrink)